Caleb Landry Jones: top related news

The Forgiven is a thematically ambitious film, something that plays in its favor while watching and becomes a point of criticism in retrospect. It positions its characters as sitting on a number of axes of difference — gender, sexuality, nationality, class, religion, age — that can at any point step in and determine how they relate to one another. Power imbalances are problematized, prejudices are aired, and the world is presented as a place defined by jagged edges that refuse to be sanded down. This makes for a compelling backdrop to a tense crime drama narrative that is fueled by gaps of knowledge the movie seems in no hurry to fill. As long as those gaps remain, they give space for small details to echo with meaning, but the impulse to resolve the story by its end diminishes its opportunity for impact. Given some time to think on it later, viewers might have trouble pinning down what it actually had to say about all those thorny subjects it seemed to be about.